1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a word recognition method of recognizing words and a word recognition program that is used to execute word recognition processing in, e.g., an optical character reading apparatus that optically reads a word including a plurality of characters written in, e.g., a reading material.
2. Description of the Related Art
For example, in an optical character reading apparatus, when reading a character written in a reading material, accurate reading can be generally performed by using knowledge of words even though an accuracy for recognizing each character is low. Various kinds of methods have been conventionally proposed as implementation methods.
Among others, there is a method disclosed in Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2001-283157 as a method of using a posteriori probability as an evaluation value for each word to enable accurate word recognition even if the number of characters is not fixed.
However, the method disclosed in the above-explained document is provided on the assumption that a position where a word is written is already known, and it cannot be said that word recognition can be performed with a sufficient accuracy when the position where the word is written is unknown. For example, when a correct word is disorderly written or an incorrect word is fairly written, an evaluation value (a matching score) of a word in a dictionary similar to the incorrect word rises, and erroneous recognition is thereby apt to be carried out.